David Maljkovic
From my research I have found that Mark Bradford’s oeuvre spans a variety of materials and mediums, from business ads, string, glue, collage and décollage, to video art and installation. However through his vast variety of works we can see the importance of his Los Angeles roots and ideas of memory in the art he produces. Bradford’s artistic works show us how he deals with the conditions of a particular moment and location, often related to the social issues of race, gender, and class identities.
For a deeper look into his heavily textured works of collage and décollage, there is the book Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, which gathers for the first time an extensive selection of these particular works of his. The book discusses the original printed posters that are collected by the artist from the environment of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, and how these “merchant posters” targeting the area’s vulnerable lower-income residents, serve as the formal and conceptual underpinnings of paper works. The artists, writers, and critics contributing to this book examine Bradford’s play with signs in relation to literary and performative theories of African-American forms, social issues in Los Angeles and broader contexts, the language used in his work and how it relates to poetry, and the physical surface of the artist’s works, as well as his processes of mining and excavation.
During the time the mid-career survey of Bradford’s artworks at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012, Blouin Art Info did a series of Modern Art Notes Podcasts with the artist. The topics that were discussed in these podcasts were: the extent to which his works have been received through his biography; What he thought of Modern Art Note’s three-part review of his exhibition at the Wexner, which look at the retrospective as a whole and the works “Crow” and “Detail” in particular; how abstract painting runs through a different art historical line in this artworks, than that of most other American artists; his works “Crow” (2003/09) and “Pinocchio is On Fire” (2010) and how these two landmark works of his, address identity; And lastly, the reasons that art education is so important to Mark Bradford and why he has made working with high schoolers an important part of his career.(http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/03/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-mark-bradford/)
In the article “Performance, Post-Border Art, and Urban Geography” (Klein, 2007), Mark Bradford’s work “Malateros” is discussed as a piece that intervenes in the San Ysidro border economy. Malateros are porters who help “people transport the cheap goods purchased in Tijuana across the border at the San Ysidro crossing.” One of his goals in constructing these carts was to make the underground economy of those porters visible by giving them a visual and thus political identity. His second goal was to make visible an underground industry that exists outside the control and surveillance that characterizes most border interactions. As an African American man, Bradford hopes to parallel the malateros with the historic African American train porters.
As part of his career as an artist, Mark Bradford has made a significant effort to work with high school students, teaching them how to engage with art. He believes that “Art is life. So you learn it, you engage with life.” As part of the Getty Artists Program in 2010, Bradford launched Open Studio, choosing K – 12 teachers as his target audience, believing that artists should take an active role in providing contemporary arts education to classrooms. Open Studio is an online collective of free, art-making ideas that are authored by noted artists on the national and international scale. Bradford’s art making activity as part of his Open Studio program is called RE-RE-Process. There are three parts to RE-RE-Process: rearranging song lyrics to make a visual remix, charting social groups in the school lunch room, and creating self-portraits through blind contouring. The central focus of all three of his activities are mapping, the students “mapping” themselves. (http://blogs.getty.edu/openstudio/artist/bradford/)
This Tumblr exploration of Mark Bradford was completed in part of a course taken on modern and contemporary art, and as of right now will no longer be used to post information. However, it is my hope that what is here will serve as a resource for those interested in the multiplicity of projects, works, and endeavors that Mark Bradford has taken on as an artist attempting to address and share notions of contemporary social life through his mediums.
